In Al-Hayatem Village of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, farmers crowded around Ahmad Adas, the head of their syndicate in Gharbia Governorate, discussing how to find solutions to their current crisis; the delay in delivering sugar beet, a major crop in their village.

In Al-Hayatem Village of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, farmers crowded around Ahmad Adas, the head of their syndicate in Gharbia Governorate, discussing how to find solutions to their current crisis; the delay in delivering sugar beet, a major crop in their village.

Some farmers were late in delivering their sugar beet, farmer Tawfik Muhammad explained, so crops were stacked and the factory failed to provide more trucks for transportation. As a result, the sugar beet had to be stored in the open to get the lands ready for rice cultivation, which spoiled huge quantities due to the high temperature. In the end, the loss was assumed by the farmers.

Moreover, according to sugar factories owners, only two factories are serving lower Egypt, one in Dakahlia and the other in Kafr el-Sheikh, and with the growing number of areas planted with sugar beet and the low number of trucks, crop stacking becomes inevitable.

New at organizing

Ahmad Adas is busy estimating the quantities of perishable sugar beet and making phone calls with the officials of the Directorate of Agriculture to find a solution, so that he can make an agreement with the affected farmers to form a delegation including syndicate members to meet the Governor of El Gharbia.

The sugar beet crisis is a hard test for the one year-old syndicate, a rare achievement since the January revolution. Though liberating civil institutions from the one-party grip has been the question of the hour after Mubarak’s step-down, the call for establishing independent syndical movements and reformulating the relevant laws is widely welcomed by farmers, workers and professionals, while ferociously resisted by many bodies, mainly the official syndicates. This has put the draft law of syndical liberties, which sets a legal framework for syndical plurality, in the government drawers for more than a year.

Hindered birth

In his house, Ahmad Adas narrates the history of his syndicate showing different kinds of official documents that associated that difficult birth. “We fought the syndicate establishment battle through the parliament since 2000,” he says, “but all efforts failed because of the former regime obstinacy. However, the January 25 revolution gave us the motivation and hope, so we resumed our way to establishing the first syndicate for all Egyptian farmers, and we established it to May 8, 2011.”

Thus, in return of a membership fee of 20 pounds and an annual contribution of 30 pounds, every Egyptian farmer now has the right to join an entity that represents him and provide support, if needed. The new syndicate activities are interesting: a lawsuit before the Administrative Court requesting the inclusion of farmers in the health insurance and pension system; contacting official bodies to distribute more fertilizers; launching medical convoys throughout all towns and holding conferences to raise farmers’ awareness on how to prevent and fight the cattle FMD disease and all these are in Gharbia alone.

The Syndicate also went successfully through the “sugar beet crisis”; after a meeting with the governor, the number of shipments was increased to finish the crop transportation to the factories. The governor also promised to discuss the idea of establishing a third factory to serve the Delta Region and thus reduce the workload of the other two factories.

Getting connected in high places

Ahmad Adas says the syndicate has not calculated its membership, but the total number is around 115,000 members in the country and around 5,500 members in Gharbia.

Additional evidence of the important role of the syndicate is the fact that its head, Ahmad Adas, was invited to a hearing session at the Constitution Constituency at Gharbia Governorate head office, where he presented ten demands and proposals for the new constitution, focusing mainly on farmers’ health and social insurance.